Science and Education Publishing

Figure 3. The saccadic activation level. At the beginning of the fixation time, the saccadic activation is at its minimum but tends to increase gradually. After about 125 msec the trend gets faster raising up to a plateau. By now, the saccadic programming is completed and the saccadic triggering takes place as soon as the activation state fluctuates beyond the threshold. The placement of the plateau differs among individuals, explaining the reading differences in the population, as well as within the same reader, depending on the difficulty of the lexical material. For simpler texts the plateau would be higher (upper panel), helping the stochastic event leading to the saccadic triggering; on the contrary, for more demanding reading the plateau would be lower (bottom panel), hampering the saccadic activation, thereby allowing longer fixations